after installing PM Portable on a USB stick and running it on my PC (WIN 7 prof.), there is a new folder on my harddisk, although it is stated there would be no traces of PM left when I use the portable version.

The new folder is here:
c:\users\...\AppData\Local\Moonchild Productions
It contains another folder called "Pale Moon".

Now, this folder is empty, because I deleted the whole folder for testing purposes -- but each time I start PM Portable again, the folders come back.

Before I deleted the folder (after the last update of Palemoon to the actal version v25.5.0), the new folder "Pale Moon" on my hard disk had contained another folder called "palemoon" which contained two files (active-update.xml and updates.xml) and another folder called "updates". Within this folder there were another two files (backup-update.log and last-update.log) plus an empty folder called "0"

Could you please tell me what I should do? All I want is that Pale Moon Portable behaves as you stated: Without leaving traces on my computer. I think this is due to some settings in the Palemoon-Portable.ini, but I didn't change anything because I am not a computer specialist but only a stupid user who likes to use this fine browser Pale Moon.

Thank you in advance (and sorry for my English: this is not my mother tongue).

Please understand that it's not stated as "not leaving traces on your computer", it's rather stated as "keeping your data with the browser". That's a subtle difference but important in this case: there are no promises that there won't be any traces of Pale Moon on a host computer, but all important and personal data will not touch the host computer.

The behavior you see can probably be completely avoided by disabling the check for updates to the browser. Go to options -> Advanced -> Update, and tell Pale Moon to "never check for updates". it will then be your responsibility to know that an update to the browser is available.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose

thank you for answering so quickly.
Sorry to say, but disabling the "check for update" does not change this behaviour: As soon as I double-click on Palemoon-Portable.exe on the usb-stick, the folders "Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon" are recreated on my HDD within the directory
c:\users\...\AppData\Local\

Hence, I will switch back to "Update automatically".

Obvisously the Starting Routine for "PMP" is different to the one of Firefox Portable (by "Portable Apps"), because the directory c:\users\...\AppData\Local\ remains unchanged when I start Firefox Portable from the usb stick.

Yeah, don't compare apples and oranges
The Pale Moon launcher is not going out of its way to virtualize everything because that's not the main goal of Pale Moon Portable.

Some potential improvements are still possible to make it "touch the host system as little as possible", actually possibly by just making changes to the .ini file (and being explicit about how the browser is started beyond setting a profile folder). I will leave that up to others to spend time on though.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose

I repair computers for a living, and "portable" to me means precisely what the author of this article is requesting - that no data will be left behind on the client's machine when run from a USB stick. I really like this browser, but with two exceptions; This one and the inability to set my home page as the start page in a new tab. Thanks for listening.

Feel free to create a batch file to remove those folders, or even use the .ini file to do it in the "cleanup" section. The reason why I don't want to remove these folders by default is if an installed version of Pale Moon is also present, in which case these folders should never be removed.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose

Thank you for your advice. Because I do not use an installed version of Pale Moon on my computer, I would like to set the changes to the Palemoon-Portable.ini on my USB stick -- but as I told in my first post, I am not a "professional" computer user and thus I don't understand what you mean: Where do I find this "cleanup" section, and what do I have to write there to have my "PMP" remove the folders mentioned above?

Moonchild wrote:Feel free to create a batch file to remove those folders, or even use the .ini file to do it in the "cleanup" section. The reason why I don't want to remove these folders by default is if an installed version of Pale Moon is also present, in which case these folders should never be removed.

Better option: not to create it in the first place. What is the reason why the profile folder has to be created by the portable edition? I read about it earlier but can't find it anymore.

I know it's better to not create them in the first place, but the profile manager in Mozilla code was not necessarily designed for portable use. Since it initializes in different places and the default folder structure used depends on the vendor and product strings, it needs a veritable fox hunt (pun intended) to find where in the code it decides to create these folders despite being started with a profile path on the command-line.

"There will be times when the position you advocate, no matter how well framed and supported, will not be accepted by the public simply because you are who you are." -- Merrill Rose